makumaro.net

Learning Skills

Work has been an interesting place and it gets static sometimes, but it is more prone to changes than most of the other things I have done in life. In Uni, you could hop from class to class and see only people for an hour or so each week, plus if you work with them in groups, you might get a little more of an idea on how they are but that fizzles away quickly once you finish the subject.

My firm has just recently hired a new person and I’ve been providing some training on occasion. I can admit that I am a terrible teacher who has little patience as my style of learning has always been to get the job done first, and figure out why it is done as such later on. This style of learning is the kind that requires a longer period of time to nurture but ultimately it allows me to reverse engineer my processes. I can be smug about it at times but I have made some time saving spreadsheets at work that are really intuitive and useful. Heh.

I was the second person hired into my “department” (so called department, there are only 5 of us at the moment) and I still recall the teething issues I had learning all these new concepts at work. I’d be worried and wondering whether I was doing enough to pick up the new material and work processes. Well, fast forward a year plus, I’m still sitting in the same old desk doing the same old things but I have learnt a lot over that period. As a side note, the new computer upgrade I got a month ago has been terribly helpful. I spend less time wrestling with the computer now and actually getting more work done using less time (technical efficiency, in the form of market efficiency where there is no spare capacity for productivity improvement. My studies are eating into my brain, save me!).

The new guy has been asking more interesting questions on the type of work we do, and as my friend pointed out, they are a high level view of why things work as they do. Heh, he probably has had more experience in financial products than I did at the beginning, but me being me, can reduce the deficit of knowing nothing in a particular field (computers, photography, cooking, brag brag brag) to being able to discern something useful about that field just by mere observation. My interest in finance got off to a slow start, but having to deal with multiple kinds of financial products at work on a daily basis, you start to become curious and you find out more about the things you dabble in.

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Heh, note to self. Should always have an idea on what you want to write before you start writing. This post started out with a vague idea and ended up as a self promotion exercise as I got lost in what I was trying to express.

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The idea is not to remain static, and be content with what you know. A lot of times we learn the basics of something and as it serves our needs, we just remain stagnant on how we do something. Understanding something new requires a steep learning curve, and it plateaus once you have learnt enough to do the job efficiently. It continues this way until the stage when you can invert the steps, make a mistake midway and know exactly how to fix it, or in other words, do it blindfolded. When you have reached that stage, you can start exploring new ideas again. Things that weren’t apparent a while ago start to make perfect sense, and you will start absorbing things at a quick pace again.

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Started early to post but the lack of direction made this post slow to finish. Heh, a process that needs to be improved. Work time.

Counting Down

Creativity hit peak a few days ago while I was just warming up to studying for my exam this Friday. Now all that’s in my mind is financial and economic information. Nothing interesting churning in my brain other than that. Not much time left to studying, but studying performance has improved dramatically over the weekend. Just need to get me away from my computer and games long enough that it’s like detox. Once you get over the initial need for it, you can focus on getting other things done.

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Contrasting styles between my new photography section redesign with my main site. Text and font used to be an afterthought for my designs, usually appearing big (which can look nice) but not necessarily fitting into the design concept of the site. Looking for something a little more streamlined for the new design, but I hope it’s not too minimalistic that it robs me of showing off textures in design.

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My new ultra wide lens is really wide, but it’s something I’m not quite used to. Used to like how my kit lens could fit in lots of stuff into the picture but the more I take pictures, the harder I find it is to frame a topic of central focus into a picture. Just to give you a sense of wide, this is how it looks like.

That is nearly 4 storeys of picture from a tight angle inside Melbourne Central.

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Heh, just needed coffee to warm the belly to be able to write something. Time’s up though, need to rush off to work before I get really late.

Nothing New

Stretching my gadget budget to the limit for this month. Heh, just acquired myself a Tokina 12-24mm lens. This lens is wide, and my mean wide. You can really cram stuff into the frame of the picture and fit everything in. This is a challenge for me as I have grown used to the longer end of the focal length like 70mm where you can focus specifically on a subject and bring out the topic matter.

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Have an exam coming up, and I never knew I’d say this, but I’ve been reading monetary policy statements from the Reserve Bank of Australia’s website and I actually find the topic matter interesting. These are the things I probably should have read while I was doing macroeconomics as a university student. Heh, and I guess I probably did, but it never made much sense back then. It is rather interesting, especially if you follow financial news on a daily basis. You get a world view picture that gives you a glimpse of what’s going on and how it would affect the world’s economy.

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Lots to do for the coming week. Glad it’s Friday and while I’ll be busy studying, it’s good to break from work.